What To Do This Weekend: Kentucky Bourbon Festival

What To Do This Weekend: Kentucky Bourbon Festival

If you're anywhere near Louisville, Kentucky, this weekend, do yourself the favor of swinging by the 18th Annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown, about a half hour outside of town. You'll find bourbon tastings from dozens of little-known craft distillers, demonstrations, barrel-rolling, and Cornhole contests (apparently Cornhole is a game like horseshoes, only with corn — we'll believe that when we see it, thanks), bluegrass music, and all the bourbon-soaked Southern cuisine you could eat in five lifetimes.

Drinking with the Colonel at the Chapeze House

AM has been exploring the bourbon country around Bardstown, visiting distilleries and attending tastings to get ourselves fully prepared for the festival, which begins on Friday. If you're ever in the area, we strongly recommend that you stop in at the Chapeze House, an old brick home in downtown Bardstown where Colonel Michael Masters (a real Kentucky Colonel) and his wife Margaret Sue Masters have an extraordinary bourbon library, from which they pour tasting flights that you can build yourself or with the Colonel's help. There's a story behind every bottle, and when you're sitting before the Colonel as he launches into a tale, drink in hand, you'll get a distinct sense that you're in the right place at the right time. The Colonel takes his bourbon seriously, but not so much that he has to measure out each taste in a little jigger. His pouring hand is heavy, and you'll leave the Chapeze House with at least three new favorite bourbons and a healthy buzz.

Tasting Old Pogue and Rare Breed

Although many of the bourbons you'll taste with the Colonel are tough to find outside three counties in Kentucky, we did taste some great ones that are more widely available. Old Pogue was one of our favorites and is slightly softer than some of the others we tasted. It's only available in a handful of states, and in New York City and Washington D.C. If we were the Michelin guide, we'd venture to say Old Pogue was worth a special trip. For a punchier and hotter sipper, we liked Wild Turkey's Rare Breed, which gave us a fairly forceful kick in the pants but still retained a chunky, woody-mouth feel that really stuck with us.

We had the opportunity to tour the Maker's Mark distillery with Master Distiller Kevin Smith, where we tasted the raw, undistilled spirit (Smith calls it "white dog") before it goes into the charred oak barrels for aging. (All of bourbon's color comes from the charred insides of the barrels.) We watched the process from corn kernel to clear, potent alcohol, and as we tasted the powerful stuff, it occurred to us that anything made with such care as bourbon is, was meant to be sipped, never knocked back in a shot.

We'll be tweeting all weekend long from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. Follow us on Twitter and we'll keep you up to speed (at the very least, you'll have fun witnessing our deteriorating ability to text).